Speedy Gonzales
Speedy Gonzales (commonly shortened to just Speedy) is an animated caricature of a mouse in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He is portrayed as "The Fastest Mouse in all Mexico" with his major traits being the ability to run extremely fast and speaking with an exaggerated Mexican accent. He usually wears an oversized yellow sombrero, white shirt and trousers (Which is a common traditional outfit worn by men and boys of rural Mexican villages), and a red kerchief, similar to that of a reveler in the San Fermin festival. To date there have been 46 cartoons made either starring or featuring this character. Background Speedy debuted in the 1953 cartoon Cat-Tails For Two, directed by Robert McKimson. This early Speedy was a leaner, rattier-looking creation with a sizable gold front tooth and also wore a red Polo shirt. The cartoon featured him outwitting a smart-and-stupid pair of cats, George and Benny (parodies of George and Lenny from the novel Of Mice & Men), aboard a ship. Later on, this original version of Speedy is used as an unnamed background character a couple of times. Although he was created by McKimson, the majority of the cartoons with him were directed by Friz Freleng. It would be two years before director Friz Freleng and animator Hawley Pratt redesigned the character into his modern incarnation for the 1955 Freleng short, Speedy Gonzales. The cartoon features Sylvester The Cat guarding a cheese factory at the American/Mexican border from a group of starving Mexican mice. The mice call in the plucky, excessively energetic Speedy to save them, and amid cries of "¡Ándele! ¡Ándele! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Epa! ¡Epa! ¡Epa! Yeehaw!" (Spanish for "Go on! Go on! Up! Up!", although "Ándele arriba" may have been intended as meaning "hurry up") courtesy of Mel Blanc, Sylvester soon gets his comeuppance. The cartoon won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons). While Speedy's last name is given as "Gonzalez" in Cat-Tails (on a printed business card shown in the cartoon), it is spelled with an 's' from Speedy Gonzales onward. Today, the earlier spelling is occasionally used by accident. Friz and Robert soon set Sylvester up as Speedy's regular nemesis in a series of cartoons, much in the same way Chuck Jones had paired Wile E. Coyote and The Road-Runner in his Road-Runner cartoons. Sylvester (often called "El Gringo Pussygato" by Speedy) is constantly outsmarted and outrun by The Fastest Mouse In All Of Mexico, causing the cat to suffer all manner of pain and humiliation from mousetraps to accidentally consuming large amounts of Tabasco hot sauce and everything in-between. Other cartoons pair the mouse with his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, The Slowest Mouse In All Of Mexico. Slowpoke regularly gets into all sorts of trouble that often require Speedy to save him—=but one cat in Mexicali Shmoes says that as if to compensate for his slowness, "he pack a gun!" In the mid-1960s when DePatie-Freleng Enterprises took over the production of Looney Tunes, Speedy's main nemesis became Daffy Duck. Trivia *After Cartoon Network started airing episodes of him in 1999, 2002 there was some controversity where the show got accused of racist and ethnic sterotyping of the character, he was never scene again for years, then when he was on air again, it was shown that some scenes were edited out, this was a similar issue with Mammy Two Shoes from Tom & Jerry. Gallery Speedy-Gonzales-Cartoon-N3.jpg Speedy-gonzalez-looney-tunes-temporary-tattoo-1.jpg Speedy-gonzales colorcorrected-e1459865859505.jpeg Speedygonzales02a.jpg Speedy.jpg Speedy Gonzales.svg.png Clip-art-speedy-gonzales-592562.jpg Downloasdfd.jpg Speed Gonzales Icon.jpg 300106 1.jpg 1459846821-speedy-gonzales-looney-tunes.jpg 996i.png 88989.jpg 8c5bf9575100716fd7bff6f3148c2395.jpg Speedy Gonzales (1955 short).jpg Bf060aac647c9ea0b13d6ca4f9a7370b.jpg Video Category:Characters Category:Males Category:Mice Category:Anthropomorphic characters Category:Looney Tunes characters Category:Warner Bros. characters Category:Mexican characters Category:Hispanic characters Category:Major characters Category:1940s characters Category:1950s characters Category:Movie characters Category:Animated characters Category:Hand-drawn characters Category:Television characters Category:Characters voiced by Mel Blanc Category:PNG characters